Did you know that an online customer is more likely to trust a product review from another customer than she is to trust a brand’s written product description? If both of those elements appear on every one of your online product pages, the review is more likely to inspire a sale than the branded content.

Need proof? Have a look at this Nielsen report from 2012. The survey, which gathered responses from 28,000 different people around the world, found that 70% of respondents trusted online reviews. Only 58% said that they trusted messages on brand websites and only half trusted email marketing efforts. Trust statistics were even worse for other forms of brand-to-customer communication like search engine ads, banner ads, and social media ads.

Building Your Trust Back Up Again

The message that Nielsen’s statistics sends is that customers just don’t trust brands anymore. Whether because of the prevalence of fraud on the internet or the fact that many brands have abused the power of targeted advertising, most companies are facing an uphill battle when it comes to winning over customers.

The good news is that there is a way for yourbrand to build that trust back up again. The key lies in embracing the thing that customers actually do trust: reviews.

Some companies have already realized this fact but have taken the wrong message from it. The result is the trend of brands “buying” positive reviews for their business on sites like Yelp, e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon.com, and even on their own product pages. Customers are smart enough to spot fake reviews. Getting caught in the act of buying fake reviews will do more damage to your brand’s trust levels than a few positive reviews (real or fake) will be able to rectify.

So how can you take advantage of customer reviews without paying for them? The answer is just to let them happen. Don’t try to control the narrative; don’t weed out all the negative reviews and only post the positive ones; and don’t censor. Just implement the option for customer reviews on your brand’s e-commerce product pages and see for yourself how the maneuver benefits your trust levels.

The Power of Customer Reviews

Why are customer reviews so powerful? And how can the trust that customers have for reviews be translated into trust for your brand?

The power of customer reviews comes from the fact that customers aren’t sure what they cantrust from brands. Your business may well have a commitment to transparency and disclosure. However, many customers still think that any communication they receive from a brand—be it a TV commercial or a piece of web copy—needs to be taken with a grain of salt. After all, brands are going to portray their own products and services positively because they have a vested interest in the success of those products and services.

Reviews are a refuge for these customers because they provide an unbiased third party opinion. Shoppers are willing to take the word of another customer—even a stranger—because they feel like that person is speaking from a position of impartiality. The reviewer doesn’t have a vested interested in the success of a brand’s product or service and therefore seems more likely to speak candidly.

By including video reviews on your own product pages, you will harness this trust in multiple ways. First, customers won’t have to go elsewhere to read impartial views on your product. They keep shoppers on your product pages, improving dwell rates and increasing the chances of a sale.

Second, customers will feel like they have more opportunity to make their voices heard. Barring customers from reviewing products on your e-commerce site feels like a way of silencing them. Giving your shoppers a platform through which to speak—and responding to their reviews—increases brand loyalty and trust.

Third, allowing any customer to say whatever he or she wants about a product creates an opportunity for both positive and negative reviews. You might be worried if and when negative reviews come in, but you shouldn’t be. Studies have shown that customers actually trust positive reviews more when they are featured side-by-side with negative reviews, simply because they feel more genuine. You can also respond to negative reviews and find ways to address the grievances of your dissatisfied customers. Not only does this system give you a way to turn a negative customer experience into a positive one, but it also lets other customers see that you are making an effort to fix a negative experience. Both factors improve customer trust.

Enable Video Reviews on Your E-Commerce Site Today

Text-based reviews are powerful and will bring you all of the benefits mentioned above, but video review media takes these benefits to a whole new level. Video reviews add more personality into the mix and forge emotional connections between the reviewer and your shoppers. They take all of the trust benefits of text reviews and amplify them.

When it comes to marketing to millennials, there is good news and bad news for brands. The good news is that millennials forge stronger and closer relationships with brands than any generation that came before them. Social media has closed the gap between brands and customers, and millennials dominate social media. Millennials interact with their favorite brands regularly online and build loyalty toward those brands in the process.

The Social Media Factor

The bad news is that millennials know that they have lots of buying power at their fingertips. The double-edged sword of social media and the internet is that, while your brand is using it to forge strong, personal relationships with customers, other brands are doing the same thing. Add the power of Amazon.com and the ever-present nature of Google and millennials have the ability to find, discover, interact with, and purchase from any brand on the planet within a matter of minutes. As such, brands that offend or disappoint millennial audiences run the risk of losing those customers just as quickly as they gained them.

Millennials understand that, through social media, they have the power to help or hurt a brand. Strong relationships with your customers on social media can lead to shares, retweets, and other instances of brand advocacy. Not every customer has thousands of followers, but each one has the power to bring friends and family to your brand. Put all of your followers together and the potential value of this reach is massive.

How Video Content Can Help

Staying positive on social media and connecting with your customers on a daily basis can go a long way toward helping you win over and keep your millennial audience. Social media is the crux of how many younger people interact not just with brands, but also with celebrities, politicians, publications, and each other. As such, learning to harness social media is a vital part of operating a successful and popular brand in the 2010s.

Social media is not the be-all-and-end-all of how millennials interact with brands. Particularly if you are an e-commerce brand selling products online, video is an essential channel for reaching millennial audiences.

Criteek recently compiled a list of statistics and survey findings about millennials in our website’s marketing intelligence section. The findings, most of which came from the 2015 Animoto Millennial Survey, showed that younger audiences are particularly drawn to video as a medium. 76% of millennial respondents said they follow brands on YouTube; 80% said they look at video content when considering purchases; and 85% said they find video product demos helpful. One in four millennials said that they lose interests in brands that don’t have video content.

Clearly, video is essential for younger customers. Indeed, if your company doesn’t have video content, you are very likely leaving money on the table from prospective millennial buyers. The challenge is to harness video content in your marketing strategy in such a way that it pairs easily with social media, helps customers arrive at purchasing decisions, and stays relatively cost-effective.

Video Reviews: The Key to Reaching Millennial Customers

By giving your customers the freedom to record and post video reviews of your products, you can take advantage of most of the key statistics revealed by the Animoto Millennial Survey. For instance, if 80% of millennials look at video content when considering purchases, you can encourage those purposes by providing relevant video content on the product pages themselves.

Many video reviewers will show off the product they are talking about in the video. With text-based customer reviews, everything has to be communicated via words and descriptions, which are very hard to visualize. In video reviews, customers can demonstrate what they are talking about while they are talking about it. As a result, shoppers have a chance to see features of your product in action—and start learning how to useyour product—before they even click “Add to Cart.”

Professional video content is expensive to produce. Particularly if you have a lot of products, creating promo videos or demo videos for every single product will lead to a substantial bill. Letting your customers prepare video content gives you a chance to have video commercials and demonstrations for your products without having to pay to produce the videos. Customer videos may not be professional in quality but they frequently answer major customer questions.

The other benefit of having video reviews on your site is how shareable they are. The Animoto Millennial Survey noted that roughly half of all consumers have shared video content posted by their favorite brands on their own profiles. Video reviews are especially social media-friendly because you can tag the customers who created the videos. Customers (particularly millennials) will feel honored to have their video reviews shared by your brand—a feeling that will bring them even closer to your brand. Other customers will share your posts and start creating video reviews with the hopes of being featured on your social media feed. In the long run, you engage your customers more effectively and widen your reach.

In many ways, shopping online is the optimal way to shop. It’s easy, convenient, fast, and accessible. Shopping at a brick and mortar store takes real commitment: customers have to set aside time to drive to the store, walk around shopping, try out or try on products, and wait in line at the checkout counter. E-commerce stores let shoppers find what they need without the drive, without the walk around the store, and without the line. They take what could easily be a one- or two-hour shopping trip and condense it into five minutes.

If there’s one drawback to e-commerce shopping, it’s that customers can’t see, touch, and feel the products. For instance, when it comes to clothing or shoes bought online, customers can’t try on items to check for fit and comfort. E-commerce sites usually have high-resolution images that display their products from a variety of different angles. However, simply seeing the product in a still-frame image is not the equivalent of holding it in your hands and trying out its features for yourself.

These factors illustrate why some customers continue to prefer shopping at physical stores despite the ease and convenience that shopping online provides. Some e-commerce companies try to rectify this shortcoming by making the product return process as simple as possible so customers can send back products that don’t match their expectations. But that’s not the only way to disrupt these reservations.

Put the “See, Touch, Feel” Element Back into the Shopping Experience

Some e-commerce brands are experimenting with letting customers “try on” or “test out” their products. Warby Parker, a designer glasses brand, sends each new customer five frames for a home try-on. This model allows customers to try out the company’s products before making a purchase. In short, it adds seeing, touching, and feeling back into the purchasing process to put their minds at ease.

It may be effective, but it’s a model that wouldn’t be sustainable for many businesses. Warby Parker pays for the shipping on the try-on pairs of glasses and provides prepaid shipping for customers to send them back after a five-day trial period. When customers choose a specific set of frames, they purchase them online and get a new pair shipped to them: they don’t just keep the ones they liked as part of the original try-on package.

An Alternative Option

Most e-commerce companies don’t have the funds to handle free shipping for a product try-on or test-out service. Companies like Warby Parker could feasibly start charging for this service, but extra expense mitigates the convenience of shopping online in the first place. It’s doubtful that customers would want to cover those extra shipping costs.

There are alternative ways to achieve a similar effect—not necessarily by actually giving your customers a chance to touch and feel your products, but by generating a similar level of engagement to make them feel completely comfortable.

Most customers have recognized that shopping online is the future of retail. As a result, they’ve come up with new ways to determine whether or not they want to buy products. Instead of going to the store and trying out potential purchases, customers read reviews from other shoppers. They engage with the opinions of other people who have bought a certain product before them, hoping that the review they read will answer key questions about the quality, functionality, fit, and usability of the product. Reviews may not recreate the “see, touch, feel” experience of brick and mortar shopping, but they provide the next best thing: they let customers see, touch, and feel products vicariously through people who have already bought those products.

Video reviews take the experience to another level. Instead of reading about people who have had the opportunity to use a product, customers can watch that person describe the product in real time. The videoformat gives reviewers a chance to add product demonstrations into their review. It enables them to pick up a product and show it to their viewers and reveal the product’s features or flaws.

Like text reviews, video reviews can’t actually give customers the ability to reach through their computer screen and touch or feel a product. However, by letting customers see a product in action—and see another person touch and feel that product—video reviews tell shoppersalmost as much about a product as a true tactile or kinesthetic experience would. The seeing part of the “see, touch, feel” experience becomes more important here because customers get to see the product in action. They are seeing another person do all of the things they would do if they had the opportunity to try out a product in person.

Best of all, video reviews don’t come with the unsustainable price tag attached to your brand that something like a free try-on program would. Once you’ve implemented the video review systemon your e-commerce site, all of the content is going to come from customers. All you have to do is promote it.

The world of e-commerce is an ever evolving beast. With the rise of mobile and tablet, we’re always on the go and connected, and whilst this is a great thing for e-commerce, it also brings with it a few new, previously unseen dilemmas. We’re less patient than ever, and want content that we can trust, that keeps us entertained, and that we can consume within seconds. The following 7 points are all reasons why user generated video content is the next big thing for e-commerce.

Reason One – Search Engine Ranking

Search engines rank user experience above all else when ranking pages. If people lose interest, not only do retailers run the risk of losing the sale, they also drop down the search rankings. Improve the time spent on the page, reduce the bounce rates, and user experience is improved. Hey Presto, you’re climbing the rankings!

Reason Two – Organic Search > Paid Search

Organic Search results are far more effective than paid content. Over 30% of consumers click on the first link of a search, with slots 2-4 making up the vast majority of the rest.

Reason Three – The Modern Consumer

We’re a society with little patience. No longer do we have time to sit and read about a product, we would far rather watch something instead. Can you afford to lose a quarter of your potential customers?

1 in 4 consumers actually lose interest in a company if it doesn’t have video (Animoto Millennial Study 2015). 57% of consumers are more confident in a purchase when they watch a product review, and less likely to return items (Google 2015).

Reason Four – Authenticity

However, the video must be authentic. If it is too promotional, or produced by the Brand or Retailer, it is seen as being biased, and therefore people are less likely to make the purchase.

People are very skeptical of sales people. Who would you trust? The commissioned Sales executive, or real life customers, with experience using the product? It works the same online as it does in the real world. Without a sales person, your product pages must do the talking.

Customer reviews are significantly more trusted (nearly 12 times more) than descriptions that come from manufacturers (eMarketer, February 2010).

Reason Six – Fraud in The System

Fraudulent text reviews are becoming a big issue for online retailers. Traditionally e-commerce sites have had to rely on text based reviews. In the internets heyday, trust was implied, however companies are now writing their own reviews, or paying others for favorable reviews, even when the reviewer has no experience with the product. User Generated Video Reviews avoid these issues by showing the consumer with the product. It’s much harder to fake an opinion when you are there holding the product that you own!

1,114 Text-reviewers sued by Amazon for being fraudulent – ABC News

Can YOU trust a review if you don’t know that the person writing it has even used the product?

Reason Seven – It Works!

In a recent Case Studywith Newton Running, by placing the Criteek widget on their product pages, they saw an average 72% increase in Dwell Time, and average 8% decrease in Bounce Rates, and crucially, an average 68% increase in Page Views over using text reviews alone.

Therefore, not only will you gain traffic, but you’ll keep them there, AND, build trust with your audience

Trust leads to more sales and more repeat customers

This has a knock-on effect in that you’ll see a lower volume of returns due to users getting a live look at the product, from real people (Bonus Stat – 22% of all online returns are made because the buyer felt that their product didn’t look or fit like they expected)

At Criteek, we specialize in video review mediafor e-commerce businesses. With video marketing becoming increasingly vital, video reviews are the key to improving your dwell rates, boosting sales, and bringing in more revenue.